Are we born atheists?

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by aaqucnaona, Apr 15, 2012.

  1. lightgigantic Banned Banned

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    since the essentials are manufactured well outside of your ability to individually or (immediate) collectively produce ... since we tend to be engaged in the pursuit of non-essentials as a mode of living
    You realize how much the petrochemical industry mobilizes such endeavors?
    And how such techniques destroy biomass in soil?



    what part of "thousands of years" and the general concern about resources vs need in a world that calls upon unsustainable practices don't you understand?



    5000+ yrs of sustainable agriculture vs the steady decline of practically everything in the last 200

    seems quite apt to me
     
    Last edited: Apr 17, 2012
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  3. Grumpy Curmudgeon of Lucidity Valued Senior Member

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    You mean five thousand years of subsistence agriculture based on the use of brutal slavery conditions for the masses who usually died of overwork, poor health and starvation before they were forty vs the steady rise of available food, medicine, transportation and age longevity for the last 200 years or so? Agriculture was "sustainable" only in the sense that it would feed all those who did not starve to death that winter. Or were you speaking strictly of the experiences of the rulers(civic or religious, though they were the same more often than not), the ones who wrote the history of the world and the people but did not share the experience of their short, brutal lives? Because, in their view, you would be correct, things have gotten worse for Kings and Popes, the new rulers are the money changers, their temples are on Wall Street, their idol is the Golden Bull. Ba'al won.

    Grumpy

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  5. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    I might be classified as an apatheist, if placed in a lab for observation and judged on external behaviors or expressions indicating that I was bored by these theist versus atheist rivalries. But internally I often feel like an ignostic or igtheist, waiting for some consensus concerning what a god with a capital G is supposed to be meaningfully defined as.

    Fundamentalist Christians seem to more unwaveringly know what they mean by it, but that drags in Noah's ark and 6,000 year creationism and the like, and by then it's clear that they need the ghost of Philip K. Death to step-in and try salvaging their situation with one of his missed-meds related "We're all really still living in Roman Empire" takes on mass illusory deception and Parminides-descended eternalism.

    The bottom line for me, personally, is that if there is a supernatural realm occupying a transcendent or metaphenomenal circumstance, it can't intrude upon the natural order as the supernatural -- whether that's because the regulating principles of a metaphysical nature won't allow it minus conversion, or a nature subsumed under and resulting from the regulating principles that perception and intellection conform to won't allow it without conversion. The naturalist will always have available or find evidence for non-occult explanations to counter whatever the Abrahamic or pagan "theist" is inferring to support the latest bogeygame fad.
     
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  7. Balerion Banned Banned

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    He's easily defeated, isn't he?
     
  8. kx000 Valued Senior Member

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    We are born agnostic
     
  9. The Esotericist Getting the message to Garcia Valued Senior Member

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    Indeed, I concur.



    Lastly. . . I would say, we are born neither. Humans are born so highly evolved, the we are neither really creatures of nature, nor creatures of nurture. However, as we observe our environment, some come to believe, that indeed, mother nature, and father time (science) do indeed exist in some mysterious conscious way, and behave in a logical predictable way that would almost seem to suggest a ordered consciousness pushing the universe toward in fact, less entropy, rather than greater entropy. So I would disagree, a human being, left to their own devices and observations on an individual level, is probably more apt to see evidence for something of the divine order rather than not. Just my two cents.

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  10. Rav Valued Senior Member

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    Folks, we've caught a Pixie, red-handed, in the act of sprinkling Pixie dust in the synapses.

    I fucking knew it.

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  11. lightgigantic Banned Banned

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    False argument - whether slavery is prominent, took a minor form as debt bondage (which is arguably how the modern world operates wholesale anyway) or was non-existent in a civilization is not an essential requirement for (non-industrial) agriculture.

    For instance slavery was abolished in america in the mid 1800's ... almost 100 years before the tractor or chemical fertilizer use grew rampant

    No I wasn't talking exclusively about europe where they bereft of such cutting edge technology such as taking a bath ...

    No ... I mean vs 200 years of destructive over consumption of resources through societies that are so centralized that most communities cannot even collectively so much as bake a loaf of bread
    Once again, wasn't talking exclusively about europe

    Since you have a strong disdain for any written records of history I guess you are relying on the strength of hollywood stereotypes in historical romances for your assertions
    :shrug:
     
    Last edited: Apr 18, 2012
  12. lightgigantic Banned Banned

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    Pixie with pixie dust ...... or the essential element that prevents a mother crocodile from crushing her hatch lings in her mouth

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  13. Rav Valued Senior Member

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  14. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    Sure, there is terminological variation among the various trends of theism.

    While uinversal consensus on this matter doesn't seem likely, partial consensus in the form of groups of theists having in roundabout the same terminology and definitions, is already possible (ie. the existing theistic religions).

    For me, the question is why do some people hold that only universal consensus (ie. everyone who considers themselves a "theist" having the same idea of "God") is relevant, and that in the absence of such universal consensus, the matter of "God" is to be dismissed from serious inquiry.


    I don't mean to sound presumptuous, but I just don't understand how come that otherwise intelligent people struggle with the "interaction problem" - ie. the problem of the interaction between the "material/natural" and the "transcendent/supernatural."

    It seems that the people who struggle with this problem (and are bored by it) are stuck in mainstream Christian ontology, and for some reason, don't bother to look into other ontologies.

    Mainstream Christian ontology has many problems - but why focus only on that ontology, and not also consider other ones?
     
  15. Rav Valued Senior Member

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    The interaction problem has little to do with Christian ontology in particular. Basically, it crops whenever someone suggests that there is a casual relationship between something that is physical, and something that is not. In fact in crops up in many contexts that have little or nothing to do with religion.
     
    Last edited: Apr 18, 2012
  16. Grumpy Curmudgeon of Lucidity Valued Senior Member

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    lightgigantic

    Slavery was abolished in 1865...

    "The first engine-powered farm tractors used steam and were introduced in 1868. These engines were built as small road locomotives and were operated by one man if the engine weighed less than 5 tons. They were used for general road haulage and in particular by the timber trade. The most popular steam tractor was the Garrett 4CD."

    "According to Vintage Farm Tractors by Ralph W. Sanders (ISBN1-55192-031-X) "Credit goes to the Charter Gasoline Engine Company of Sterling, Illinois, for first successfully using gasoline as fuel. Charter's creation of a gasoline fueled engine in 1887 soon led to early gasoline traction engines before the term "tractor" was coined by others."
    http://inventors.about.com/od/tstartinventions/a/tractors.htm

    By the turn of the century, barely 35 years later the agricultural revolution was in full swing, hardly a hundred years. And slavery was continued until the 1960s in the prison industrial systems set up after the Civil War...

    “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

    13th Amendment, Section 1

    "Convict leasing was a system of penal labor practiced in the Southern United States, beginning with the emancipation of slaves at the end of the American Civil War in 1865, peaking around 1880, and ending in the last state, Alabama, in 1928.

    Convict leasing provided prisoner labor to private parties, such as plantation owners and corporations like Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company. Corruption, lack of accountability and racial violence resulted in "one of the harshest and most exploitative labor systems known in American history." African Americans, due to “vigorous and selective enforcement of laws and discriminatory sentencing”, made up the vast majority -- but not all -- of the convicts leased.

    In Georgia convict leasing began on May 11, 1868, when provisional governor Thomas H. Ruger issued a convict lease for 100 African American prisoners to William Fort for work on the Georgia and Alabama Railroad as a solution to the labor shortage problem.

    In Tennessee, the convict leasing system was halted on January 1, 1894 because of the attention brought by the Coal Creek War of 1891, an armed labor action lasting over a year. Free coal miners attacked and burned prison stockades, hundreds of convicts were freed, and the surrounding publicity turned Governor John P. Buchanan out of office. The end of convict leasing did not mean the end of convict labor. The state sited its new penitentiary, Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, with the help of geologists, built it as a working coal mine, and ran it at significant profit. These prison mines closed in 1966.

    Convict leasing began in Texas by 1883 and was abolished in 1910."
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_lease

    So, yes, agriculture needed cheap labor(slavery by one name or another)until the Industrial Revolution provided mechanical muscle to replace those slaves. And today a few percent of the men needed to make a farm barely survive back then can provide such an overabundance of food to feed the whole country that they must be payed not to grow some crops.

    Really? You have no valid argument, you have no facts and I am the one basing my argument on woo?

    Grumpy

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  17. Syne Sine qua non Valued Senior Member

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    Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.
    -William Makepeace Thackeray​
     
  18. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    If you compare other ontologies, such as some Hindu ones, for example, with the mainstream Christian one, you see that the interaction problem as typically posed by Westerners seems to be framed by mainstream Christian ontology, and that it couldn't be framed that way in relation to Hindu ontology.

    In general, Western atheists are Christian atheists, as their atheism is shaped in relation to mainstream Christianity.
    A Hindu atheist (ie. an atheist whose atheism is shaped in relation to Hinduism) is considerably different from the Christian atheist.


    The ideas about that which is not physical are somehow informed or derived from religion.
     
  19. lightgigantic Banned Banned

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    and as business enterprises they were largely economic failures till around post WW1.

    While unpopular at first, these gasoline-powered machines began to catch on in the 1910s, when they became smaller and more affordable.[11] Henry Ford introduced the Fordson, the first mass-produced tractor, in 1917.


    In 1920, a revolution farm machinery was just beginning. In York County Nebraska, most farmers were still farming with horses, like many of their counterparts across America.


    And even then, rampant use of farm machinery didn't really get off in a big way till another World war later (mainly due to lower gasoline prices and diesel agricultural machinery becoming widespread in the 1950's )


    so yeah ... almost 100 years of agriculture without slaves and also without machinery so you you still have the same false argument on your hands ...

    But just in case you are still not convinced ...
    Tilling was first performed via human labor, sometimes involving slaves. The wooden plow was then invented. It could be pulled by mule, ox, elephant, water buffalo, or similar sturdy animal.

    So even in civilization that were pre-plow and bullock there is no essential requirement for slaves

    In short, agriculture has no essential requirement for either slaves or industrial techniques and to suggest otherwise is simply idiocy.

    :shrug:

    just to put aside the misinformation you presented in the name of the appearance of industrial agriculture for a moment, you made the suggestion that your views of pre-modern history are not based on written accounts so I guess that leaves you nothing but the authority of woo

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    Last edited: Apr 19, 2012
  20. lightgigantic Banned Banned

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    Reductionist views of consciousness have an equal need for the appearance of pixies
     
  21. Rav Valued Senior Member

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    Ahhh, I see. You're so sensitive that you think that every little humorous aside must necessarily be an attack on your beliefs.

    What I was actually referencing was a comment by Patricia Smith Churchland who remarked the following about Roger Penrose's Orch-OR theory of consciousness: "Pixie dust in the synapses is about as explanatorily powerful as quantum coherence in the microtubules."
     
  22. Rav Valued Senior Member

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    To some extent, sure. But the basic problem of causal interaction also crops up in the philosophy of mind, and it need not have anything to do with religious beliefs.
     
  23. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    That is a revealing projection on your part.


    In that case, LG and you (if you agree with Patricia), actually agree.
     

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